I heard a click. A small green-glass shaded desk lamp burned to life. It illuminated a desk cluttered with leather-bound journals and ancient papers.
She sat down in the creaky leather chair behind the desk. “I don’t come here at night,” she said, and glanced around.
I followed her furtive gaze through the shadows, but I didn’t get a vibe from the room. Well, not a creepy one, anyway. I actually felt sort of comforted, safe. Maybe knowing Puck found some kind of refuge there in his living-life gave me solace. Or maybe I’m just a sentimental weirdo twit.
She hadn’t told me the room was Puck’s study, but she really didn’t have to. This was his real home, I knew. I could almost see it—Puck sitting at his desk, a calabash pipe clamped in his mouth, leaking tendrils of smoke from his lips like a sleeping dragon. Poring over volumes of old…history? Huh.
“Ophelia?” I said, and looked up at her.
She’d already cracked one of the leather journals on the desk, and was flipping absently through the pages.
“I brought you in here for a reason. Now, I don’t know why Grampa sent you—”
“My friends are in trouble—”
“Wait,” she said, and continued. “But there is something you have to understand first. Before anything else happens.”
My eyebrow came up. Couldn’t help myself.
“And you’re not going to want to hear it.”
Oh boy. I could feel her tone. It’s how I imagined a nun would speak to a pregnant teenager. Just a succotash of lost potential and guilt sliced thick. Add a pinch of sage wisdom and serve cold.
I actually…don’t know what succotash is.
“This…thing. This way you’ve chosen to live is a mistake.”
The anger showed up first. A hot swell of it boiled up into my face, and I half-stood from my chair.
“Lucy—”
“Stop. I didn’t choose anything,” I said. “And besides, you don’t know anything about my situation.”
She leaned back in the chair. The vulture voice returned, but icier.
“I know a few things, Ms. Lucy Day. You’re a runaway, right? Twice in as many weeks?”
“Shut up,” I said. The words barely fit through my teeth.
“You’re here tonight,” she said. “So my guess is you fell off the bandwagon of the living…what…last Friday?”
“Stop.”
“Can I take a wild guess? Maybe underage drinking and driving? Raped in an alleyway? Stop me when I get close—”
The base of her chair broke with a thunder-crack, dumping her onto the ground. She flapped her arms comically, but didn’t catch a hold of anything and ate it spectacularly. A live current of raw electricity sparked across the fingertips of my open right hand. I looked down at them, expecting to see lurid blue arcs, but saw nothing. I stood up.
“Feel good about that?” she asked, scowling.
“Yes.”
She made her best effort in collecting her dignity as she got to her feet. Frankly, the amount of guilt I felt about knocking her on her ass could fit underneath a door. Still, I couldn’t help but think I was proving her point. Just another out-of-control freak.
“Well,” she said, and glanced around the room. Finding nothing satisfactory, she scooped up one of the journals and sat on the edge of the desk, her legs dangling off the side. “How much time do we have?”
I raised an eyebrow. “You don’t want to know what it is you’re going to be doing for me?”
She shrugged. “In a few. How much time?”
“Not much,” I said.
I pictured Morgan and Zack lying in their hospital beds, bristling with tubes. Another vulture, Abraham, floating above them. No, not floating—circling. Then again, he was after me, wasn’t he? Puck said we were yin and yang, two parts of the same whole. He hadn’t even told me how to kill him, if it came down to it—told me I couldn’t. Told me I wouldn’t have to. Forewarned is forearmed, they say, which means I was going in with a rubber band gun.
“Then I’ll be as quick as I can, because the soul you save just might be your own,” she said, her face curling into a wry smirk. That line might have been funny from any other face.
“Hurry,” I said. “I don’t need a lesson. I need help.”
“Too-bad, so-sad,” Ophelia said. “You’re getting both.”
I sighed. I actually made a point of sighing. Not my most mature moment, I admit.
“This, as you might have guessed, is one of the diaries of one Robin Goodman. My grandfather, and your ‘Puck,’” she said. “And this particular volume is of unique interest.”
“Why’s that?” I asked, still all immature anger and snotty tone, I admit.
“Because it’s the only one that talks about his Mors. Drop the tone if you want my help.”
I snorted, crossed my arms, and nodded. Fact was, this was what I needed. What Puck wouldn’t tell me. How he did it. He wanted me to run tonight, to bait Abraham and get away. To hell with that. One of us wasn’t walking away tonight. I bit my lip, clenched my working fist, and tried to steady my jangling nerves.
Ophelia looked up at me, the diary cradled in her hands, her eyes showing something uncharacteristically like sympathy.
“Ready?” she asked.
“I doubt it.”
She cleared her throat and began to read.
Chapter Sixteen
Puck, Revisited
Robin Woodrow Goodman, born in Year-of-Our Lord Eighteen-Eighty-Four, came screaming to life in the back room of a saloon. His mother, Adeline Emelda Goodman, owned the establishment and hadn’t spent a day of her pregnancy in rest. When the time came, little Adeline, who had never tasted the air above Five-Feet-One-inch, put down her bar rag, blew out a long sigh, and motioned for Jamison Curdly, the piano player, to come over to the bar.
She whispered a few words in his ear, turned, and walked calmly into the saloon’s back room. Jamison Curdly swept off his hat, wiped his forehead, and called Doctor William Darwin over to the sideboard. Now, Doctor William Darwin was no doctor, but that wasn’t a secret. And he had no relation to the famed Evolutionary, I assure you. In fact, the only thing he did own was a mortuary and a quick tongue.
When Jamison Curdly whispered in his ear, Dr. William Darwin laughed and slapped his leg. Jamison shook his head. The Doctor explained that he wasn’t a doctor. Jamison said he wasn’t one either. They shook hands and went into the back room.
The procedure was messy, but successful. Luckily Adeline had done her share of research on the topic, and directed her two would-be pioneer gynecologists through every grisly step. She survived the encounter, against all the laws of God, Man, and Irony. Three powerful figures, with the last reigning over the first two. Then again, a baby and his mother dying in a messy birth didn’t even touch spheres with Irony. That was of Reality, an ugly Force of Nature that ought to be done away with.
And so I tried to live like I was born—foolishly, bravely, and with a hint of the absurd. It did me well, and to be sure, there are many worse ways to live.
I was raised in Arizona, the town of Strawberry, the son of a widowed bar owner. My mother, aforementioned Little Adeline, had owned the place ever since my father, her sweet Benny, died of illness. That illness being lead-poisoning—he’d been accidentally shot by a drunk with a penchant for waving his gun around. An ignoble death, indeed.
As I aged, I had two obsessions. One of them was my mother—I spent more time at the bar than any child had the right to claim. Strike that—than any adult even had the right to claim. This changed when I was of age to go to school, and even then I returned swiftly and with excitement to my mother’s side. Not the most healthy relationship, perhaps, but she was my everything, and she doted on me.
I played cards with the more trustworthy customers, decided by Mother, of course. I learned Poker and Faro and Black Jack before I knew how to read. Another lesson also found its way to me, at a much quicker pace than the most of man—I learned the ef
fects of alcohol–sheer observation, of course–in all of its gory details. I watched more than a few men drinking themselves into death, and I witnessed the discharging of more bodily fluids than most doctors could credit. To wit, I have never been, nor will I ever be, I imagine, much of a drinker. The smell of a good whiskey, or hell, even a bad one, conjures pleasant memories, but the taste is not for me.
Dear Mother taught me many of the lessons I carry with me, in fact.
“Never match wits with wit of no match.”
Or…
“See a penny, pick it up. Money is its own reward.”
And…
“The percentage of Vermouth in a man’s martini is inversely proportional to his character.”
All truisms’ I have taken to heart.
I looked up at Ophelia and shook my head.
“This is fascinating,” I said, and I truly meant it. “And Puck is infuriatingly mysterious. But I have to know where this applies to me.”
I hadn’t forgotten Puck and Morgan and Zack, hiding in a train station, no doubt surrounded by a dozen of the dragging, moaning horrors that had chased us down the highway back in the Grey Meadows. The wraiths, I think Puck had called them. And I couldn’t forget Morgan and Zack in this world, sitting in hospital beds being doped by a monster whose sole purpose was to kill me. Re-kill me.
And while any other time, on any other day, I would have lost a finger to learn Puck’s story, I had to know something more—how could I stop Abraham? Puck told me I wouldn’t need to, that I wasn’t ready. I disagreed on both counts.
Ophelia raised an eyebrow and plucked her glasses from their delicate perch on her nose. She closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose before replacing the glasses.
“Okay,” she said, and glanced back down at the book.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“You want to know about his Mors, right? The thing that came for him?”
That’s exactly what I wanted to know. Puck wasn’t being hunted like a dog in the streets by some glowing white freak—I knew for a fact he’d shook his personal Grim Reaper off years ago. And I had to know how.
“I want to know how he killed it,” I said.
“Killed her,” she corrected. “Ms. Isabelle Cartwright.”
I took a huge breath, not ready for the information I was about to hear. I had developed a sixth sense for bad news.
“The Mors are people. I think,” Ophelia said. “Or Grampa thinks they were, anyway. Still interested in murdering one?”
I rubbed my temples. I thought of the night in the parking lot, staring down five drooling rapists. Would I have killed, if I could? If I’d been holding a gun, would I have used it to save my life? It wasn’t a hard decision.
I would have killed them all.
“Just skip ahead,” I said. “Tell me about Isabelle.”
She shook her head, opened the old journal, and began flipping pages.
“No,” I said, and held my hand out. I took her gnarled fingers in mine, looking into her watery eyes. There wasn’t time for this. I could hear the tick-tock of some terrible clock, burning away the minutes of Zack and Morgan’s lives. “You’ve read the journal, right?”
Ophelia nodded. “I don’t know about this…I’ve seen Grampa…”
Her voice shrank, and she sounded more than a bit like a frightened little girl. I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I thought I would.
“I can do it without hurting you,” I said. “I think. Don’t think of anything but the journal. Nothing but that. Picture it, the part about Isabelle, about Puck and his Mors.”
Ophelia set her lips into a grim line. “Your friends are in danger?”
“Yes,” I said, my voice choked.
Ophelia closed her eyes. I picked her hand up, cradled it in mine, set my lips against her knuckles. And I breathed.
They weren’t images this time—I wasn’t taking a true memory. The flashes came as words, a memory of a memory, all at once. My vision went black, and I saw—
The year was Nineteen-Fifty-One, and I’d been officially dirt-napped for seven years. I do not know what took her so long—I have spoken with a few Phantoms in what I call the Grey Meadows, and all of them have told me that their Mors had begun hunting them almost from the moment of revivification. Hell, I’d even had the time to pull double duty as a teacher and student at Stanford, instructing Engineering by day and achieving my doctorate at night.
Something about being reduced to atoms by a thousand-ton explosion really kick-starts the old ambition, however dusty and tired it once was.
My mind reeled as I tried to pull myself out of the flow of Puck’s words, stolen from Ophelia—explosion? I felt my mind groping through Ophelia’s, and I saw it, Puck’s death—a locomotive by the docks. He was working on it, repairing it? A ship full of munitions, for the war…an accident. Fire and heat, swallowing up everyone nearby. I dived back into the memory, trying to sort through the borrowed images. I found Puck’s voice again, on the day he met his Mors, I think…
It was in one of my classes that I felt what I would later refer to as the bête-noire—a paralyzing, irrational fear. It washed over me. No, more than that—it inhabited me. Defined me. One moment I was explaining to a class full of freshman that the acceleration of a body is proportional to the resultant force acting on it—being Newton’s Second law, actually—and the next moment I was running down the hallway, playing Bullet Bill Dudley and shouldering students twice my size out of the way. There may have been a large degree of girlish screaming, as well.
I woke in the faculty restroom—the ladies one, naturally—vomiting my guts out and holding my jacket over the back of my head, just like they taught us if the A-Bomb ever hit. Ms. Lansing, an American Literature teacher, managed to coax me out of my panic-stricken stupor. It wasn’t until my brain began to swim out of its soup that I realized I had run across the entire Stanford Campus to the English building. Even half-in my fugue, I knew why I had gone there. Some primal part of me still ran to my long-gone Miri when trouble hit.
I faced a few inquiries after that—good natured, trying to be helpful. But a friendly witch-hunt is still no vacation in Fiji. Half the school had seen my shrieking, unseemly flight through the campus, and the board required a little more than my word that it wouldn’t happen again. The fact was, I had no idea if it would happen again. In all possibility, without having an explanation or a reason for it occurring, it most definitely would happen again. I settled for a sabbatical. When I say I settled, I mean, the board chose to press the importance of taking some time off. It was that, or take a lot of time off.
She found me on my second day of vacation. Points for persistence, I suppose.
I’d been reading, smoking my pipe, enjoying the sun—what you might expect from a stuffy professor on sabbatical. At noon on the second day, I felt the bête-noire again. First my stomach did a somersault, then my heart kicked it into top gear. My mouth ran as dry as a Mojave summer and my palms went slick. My brain told me to run, to flee, to do anything but stay in that spot. I dropped my book and leaped out of my recliner. Olivia wasn’t home, and Tanya hadn’t lived with us for six months, since she’d married that…musician, James. Anyway.
I was alone. And no one was going to help me. Even as my reasoning began to self-destruct in panic, I knew if I couldn’t stop it, something worse might happen this time. Run through a window, cut my jugular. Flee naked down the street. Decide to hide in the oven. Who knows.
I squeezed my fists together. I bit my lip. I tried my very best to hold my place. That’s when the knock on my door came.
I answered, to see a lovely young woman who would go on to introduce herself as Isabelle Cartwright. The bête-noire began to fade—I thought that maybe the presence of another person was allowing my inborn fear of humiliation to override the irrational panic. Of course, that wasn’t the case at all—I’d learn later that the bête-noire was an encoded phantom trait, a natural warning system to det
ect the approach of a Mors, our own personal brand of psychopomp. Now, in the truest and most excellent example of an evolutionary arms race, the Mors possess the ability to dampen the bête-noire, in close proximity. They even seem to have the ability to produce a kind of euphoria in their prey.
I felt this, immediately. When I saw Isabelle, I sensed a kind of relief and warmth baking from her. She asked if she could come in and speak with me. I asked her if she was in any of my classes—she looked about the right age. She told me that she wasn’t, but she had a friend who was. A friend who was in trouble. She wanted to speak to me about the issue, apparently. I let her in, and asked her if she wanted any tea.
She asked me what it was like to die. To truly be dead. She did not ask me with a predator’s voice, I remember—there was longing in her tone. A real desire to know. I answered her truthfully—it felt like the end, like my life had been taken from me, and everything before it had been a show. As though a wet grey blanket had been pulled over my body, and I was looking at the world through a filter of ash. I wanted to be alive. I needed to be alive. But I was not, and I knew that for sure.
I’m not certain why I told her, or why I wasn’t surprised at her arrival. Maybe it was the euphoric aura that she projected—maybe I was tired of pretending. She began to glow bright white, to fill me up with warmth and light. Part of me really wanted to believe that she was sending me to a better place.
But another part of me knew there was no better place. Not for me, anyway. I was a monster, and I had lived off the memories and emotions of hundreds of people since the day I’d died. Not murdering, not hurting, but you might call it a kind of killing. Taking from people what it is that defined them. Destroying what they had earned.
That part took over. That part activated a portion of my brain I’d never used before. It drew the essence I’d stolen from my last victim into my mind, and I lashed out at Isabelle. With only the power of my mind, what science-fiction writers called telekinesis, I threw cute, little, glowing Isabelle through the kitchen wall, an armoire, and finally through and out the front door. It drained me, and little more than a transparent ghost, I ran. Well, I flipped. I pushed myself into the Grey and ran for my life.
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